As a young girl danced alone ceremoniously around a fire, surrounded by people stamping their feet, banging drums and chanting ritualistically, photographer Heidi Laughton looked on, with a feeling of unease.

In the farthest reaches of the Amazon rainforest, the last remaining elder shamans of the Matsés tribe came together in a quest to save their ancestral knowledge from the precipice of extinction. The gathering, held in May in a remote village on the frontier divide of Perú and Brazil, concluded over two years work and culminated in the production of the first Traditional Medicine Encyclopedia ever written by an Amazonian tribe. The 500-page repository details medicinal plants used by Matsés healers for a diversity of ailments.

An iconic Bronze Age girl who was buried in Denmark about 3,400 years ago came from a foreign land, a new analysis of her hair and teeth suggests. The Egtved girl was named after the village where she was found. All of her bones were missing from her remains, but her clothing, hair, nails and some teeth were still in pristine condition.

Scientists are beginning to tap into a wellspring of knowledge buried in the ancient stories of Australia's Aboriginal peoples. But the loss of indigenous languages could mean it is too late to learn from them.The Luritja people, native to the remote deserts of central Australia, once told stories about a fire devil coming down from the Sun, crashing into Earth and killing everything in the vicinity.

t's hard being gay and a sangoma, traditional healer Michael Khumalo told a workshop organised as part of the Khumbulani Pride events in Cape Town last Thursday. The community did not take gay sangomas seriously, Khumalo said. The workshop which was part of a series designed to educate communities about issues faced by gay and lesbian people. People mocked gay sangomas and undermined their gifts, he said.